From Free Life No 38, July 2001

The Reality of People, the Illusion of the State: Some Thoughts From A Funeral, by Nigel G. Meek

On an otherwise beautiful day in late spring 2001, I attended the funeral of my own late father's business partner. They were rather remarkable men: proficient technicians and buccaneering but humane entrepreneurs who left this world a better place for their time in it.

In the main, along with a few friends and miscellaneous acquaintances, the mourners were drawn either from the deceased's family or those associated with the old company. And it struck me that this said something quietly profound about the nature of human relationships. For here in the end, to say their farewells, were those who had the most intimate and materially real ties: family, friends, and colleagues.

For I found myself asking: where were the mourners from the State? Where was the mourner from the Treasury, there to commemorate the wealth produced and tax paid? And where was the mourner from the Department of Employment, there to commemorate the jobs created? And where was the mourner from the Foreign Office, there to commemorate the promotion of Britain fostered by the high quality goods supplied by their export-led business? And where was the mourner from the Ministry of Defence, there to commemorate the vital equipment to be found on Britain's nuclear submarines?

Of course abstract collectivities exist and are important, but they are of a reflexive nature: synergistic aggregates of their constituent individuals. Nations, for example, exist inasmuch as there is a cultural and usually geographical tradition of a mass of people who perceive themselves to be part of the nation and feel its continuation to be of merit.

But in the end, for good or for ill, it is real people to whom or by whom things are done or not done. The abstract State does not care because it cannot care. Only individuals can care. And when we surrender to the State our responsibility for caring we hand over our loved ones and indeed ourselves to an entity that can only relate to us through the lens of its own nature: abstract and impersonal. Humans may often be inhumane, but like all such collectivities the State can never be human.

Nigel G. Meek sits on the Executive Committee of the Libertarian Alliance, and is a research student at the London Guildhall University.